Posted
by
timothyon Saturday December 18, 2010 @03:35PM
from the you-got-the-wrong-idea-mister dept.

achowe writes "Steve Linford of Spamhaus sent this to a private anti-spam list and asked that the message get out far and wide: 'For speaking out about the crime gangs located at the wikileaks.info mirror IP, Spamhaus is now under ddos by AnonOps. As our site cannot be reached now [actually sporadic], we can not continue to warn Wikileaks users not to load things from the Heihachi IP. ... AnonOps did not like our article update, here is what we said and what brought the ddos on us.'" At the conclusion of this message: "Spamhaus continues to warn Wikileaks readers to make sure they are viewing and downloading documents only from an official Wikileaks mirror site. We’re not saying 'don’t go to Wikileaks' we’re saying 'Use the wikileaks.ch server instead.'" Here is Spamhaus's full warning.

I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation [wikipedia.org]. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.

Last time I checked wikileaks used self signed certs and at this point I'd love to simply see a interview with assange where he lists the "official" wikileaks sites and reads out some of their SSL certs.

is wikileaks.org still in the hands of the wikileaks organization or does the DHS control it now or some third party?Or has it just been infected with malware to add a redirect?

Is their twitter account really them?

is there even any way for anyone to anonymously submit documents any more?

The Pirate Parties provide and administrate the wikileaks.ch network (note that the same network serves wikileaks.de and wikileaks.lu). Understandably, we all feel very strongly about the importance of whistleblowing and freedom of the press. I personally will vouch for those servers' integrity at this time. Specifically, Pirate Party members in the UK, Holland, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic have all donated servers.

I'm sorry that these servers are not currently available over SSL. As I understand it, some of these servers are hosted on IP addresses shared with other websites, and apparently this setup is incompatible with SSL. In addition, we have not yet identified a signing authority that we feel confident that would be resistant to coercion and subornation by agencies looking to discredit or manipulate Wikileaks. (Got a suggestion? Reply to this post!)

I'll re-raise the issue with the PPI organising committee, and see whether we can organise something.;-)

I'm afraid that I can't speak for any of the Wikileaks-specific issues, such as document submission or the status of the wikileaks.org domain.

StartSSL is well priced and is completely based in Israel I believe. Awful website but they would probably be your best bet.Yes they issue valid certificates themselves - they dont resell Verisign or similar.

I'd settle for a cert signed by a few organizations like the pirate party and any other organizations who could vouch for a particular server.If I really needed to make sure it was secure then I wouldn't care too much about that green padlock symbol so much as it being signed by a number of organizations I do trust who themselves publish their public keys on their own websites in various hard-to-tamper formats.

Write the fingerprint of your certificates in a text file. Sign that file with your GPG key(s) (i.e. keys of 1-2 well known wikileaks members, starting off with Julian would be fine:-). Then publish the signed file.

Either inept or under orders to keep the kiddies that get caught up with them from getting real dead. Anon is kinda like the perpetual children's crusade of the Net... Brought to you by the letter 'E' as in 'ternal' and the month of September.

I wonder if they can help with the 'Grim Sleeper' case coming out of Los Angeles. They should distribute the pics to the darkest places and see if they can correlate any suspected victims with other material that might indicate whether being in the Sleeper pics is in

I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation [wikipedia.org]. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.

At last, this is coming out! I've been repeating this obvious thing on every Anonymous story that Slashdot has echoed out until now: we have no idea who is behind so called "Anonymous". A naive teenager is arrested from time to time to give credence to the myth that the Web is under the threat of unruly teenagers, opening the door to repressive legislation.

Now with this, we are beginning to get to hard facts, which should help us awaken our traditional media journalist friends: press, TV, radio. Congratulation for coming up with the term AnonOps. It tells the whole story in a nutshell.

I doubt everything, or even most things, that the various 'anonymous' (a singular unified label misses the entire point, but I digress) attributed activities have been false-flag. It does make for a neat cover, but a difficult and unruly one. To give any sort of credence that something is a 'legitmate' anonymous attack, it is almost defacto not accompanied with any sort of unified claim, but instead by nebulous consensus over numerous highly fluid websites and IRC channels. Faking that without unrelated mem

Faking that without unrelated members crying foul over obvious subversion attempts would be incredibly difficult, even even harder would be attempting to sway the actual anonymous DDOS attackers themselves....

tl;dr version: any agency attempting to spam with a target would be called out. Performing a DDOS then claiming it was anonymous without any corroboration would be equally obvious. Any attempting to sway opinion through a false majority would be promptly accused of samefaggotry and ignored.

You might as well be saying that black-ops in anti-globalization demonstrations cannot be manipulated, or cannot be themselves undercover agents, because it would be too difficult to fake a demonstration. By the way, there are videos on Youtube showing some particularly unruly of those black-ops to be members of the police force. This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.

This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.

Not so. The dynamic is totally different. A demonstration is basically a ruly mob, and can be subverted into an unruly mob; the thing is that its members are physically surrounded by other people, do not have time to think or easy access to relevant information, can only communicate with great difficulty

Of COURSE it's a false flag operation. The brave freedom fighters of Anonymous couldn't POSSIBLY be mistaken or misinformed in what they do. There's no way they're all just a bunch of kids with no idea what they're doing. The plan to DDOS Amazon to its knees was truly brilliant, in that it allowed the world to see how quickly Anonymous can shift their attack to new targets.

How about adding another layer to the whole conspiration theory? AnonOps isn't a false flag operation, but since you can't tell who is Anonymous by their very nature, now false flag ops are popping up attacking "good" services and claiming it's AnonOps.

Considering that there is no "membership" criteria to be part of Anonymous.. Anyone and Everyone who claims to be... IS. Therefore, I can go rob a bank and claim i'm part of Anonymous. It would be completely true.

That's the problem with an organization with no real structure or chain of command, there is no way to prevent people from doing things and claiming the group being responsible.

There is a chain of command behind AnonOPs ddos attacks. The people running the anonops IRC network appear to be pulling most of the strings.

Some script kiddies have lone wolfed targets to no avail and some have organised independently to attack in groups. These small attacks always fail but the large one's are coordinated by a command hierarchy within the IRC network.

Although there seems to be allot of confusion amongst the script kiddies; some even claiming "We have no leader!" yea then who is setting the !lazor command?

I think they are just angry idiots with too much time on their hands. There's a reason why vigilantism is so frowned upon and force out in a civilized society: Vigilantes suck at justice. They shoot first, ask questions later. They are all about the Great Cause(tm) whatever that cause happens to be and don't do a good job thinking about any trouble they cause.

Now this is made even worse by the/b/tards because they are not very organized, operate with what they believe to be impunity, and are often kids.

So my bet is not a false flag op, just a bunch of dumbasses causing trouble. They've decided that Wikileaks will be their Great Cause(tm), until they get bored and find something else, and lash out at any perceived enemies of it without thinking about it.

There's a reason why vigilantism is so frowned upon and force out in a civilized society: Vigilantes suck at justice

The United States of America is obviously not a civilized society. My personal experience with La Jolla, CA, indicates that vigilanteism is the general rule--and not vigilanteism to combat high profile violent crime or high cost white collar crime... no, people like to be vigilantes just to go around playing surrogate parent against the homeless, or hoping to be the next one to call the police on street people.

Vigilanteism isn't about justice. It's about being the person with the juiciest gossip.

just a bunch of dumbasses causing trouble.

A very good description of the retired folks, the dog-walkers, the neighborhood watch, and the wealthy snobs around my area. Their entire method of life involves: provoke problem where there was none, call police.

If they happen to catch one of the actual drunks or dumpster diving troublemakers then they give themselves extra credit. Maybe harassing me is practice for them.:-(

If you haven't noticed, we are still in the midst of a recession. Work is still hard to come by. Example: A fast food restaurant in town was hiring lately, and they received 300 applications for 1 position, roughly equivalent to 1% of everyone in the county applying for the same job.

(Interestingly enough, unemployment in town is relatively low (still high for the young, though), but just about everyone works outside of town.)

They're just a bunch of stupid teenage script kiddies who think they're being "1337 haxxors" by running scripts other people made. They don't care if they're actually doing more to silence free speech than the US government is, as far as they're concerned, they're "sticking it to the man".

I'd wager that most of them have never even read the comic book that V for Vendetta (the movie) was based on.

I'm wondering if anyone actually did any research before claiming that it's anonymous behind this. A false flag would be someone pretending to be anonymous while ddosing some website. However, it seems that everyone is simply assuming that anonymous is behind every ddos that happens to any site tangentially connected to wikileaks, even when no one claiming to be anonymous has anything to do with it.

The original Wikileaks domain was wikileaks.org. Wikileaks has not used that domain in a while. The.org TLD is under the control of the USA (registry and registrar are both US based companies). It is unclear if Wikileaks is still in control of the wikileaks.org domain.

Spamhaus suggests that irc.anonops-irg.net is the address of the "Anonymous" coordination IRC server. The most current reference to an Anonops IRC server I could find names it irc.anonops-irc.org, which currently d

I've been watching the Anonops IRC since the attack on paypal, as I'm sure allot of people are.

AnonOPs is a false flag operation. I see people crying things like "SUPPORT FREESPEECH" , "end FASCISM" and "Support free expression" and all sorts of militant libertarian war cries. While at the same time talking about attacking websites they disagree with. I have tried pointing out this hypocrisy to no avail.http://s3.danscomp.net/anonirc2.jpg [danscomp.net]

As a security researcher monitoring criminal networks is a part of what I do. The real value often comes from communicating with the perpetrators (where possible) to understand their reasons for doing it. Anonymous is especially interesting because unlike many such networks these people have no financial reward for their participation. I have since found people on the network who are happily explaining their ideology to me, understanding this will be the first step to shutting them down.

Anonymous isn't a group, and therefore a false flag is impossible. Anonymous is the name given to any number of people who are on the internet anonymously exchanging ideas at any given time. If the FBI wants to troll/b/ and encourage people to attack innocent people, that's not "false flag" any more than a highschool loser doing the exact same thing.

Take a chill pill, bro, please: it is worth noting [spamhaus.org] this:

Spamhaus is currently under a 2.1Gbps DDOS attack which began at 05:20 CET. As we are used to DDOS attacks from cybercriminals our anti-ddos defences are holding and our web servers are still operating, a little slower than normal.

Was it really a good idea to post that link on slashdot - to a DDoS:ed site?

In general, no. However in this case, it is worth noting [spamhaus.org] this:

Spamhaus is currently under a 2.1Gbps DDOS attack which began at 05:20 CET. As we are used to DDOS attacks from cybercriminals our anti-ddos defences are holding and our web servers are still operating, a little slower than normal.

When you have a large DDoS tool at your beck and call, who has time to bother with accuracy and trifling details like the truth? This is just further evidence that "anonymous" is some unemployed young adult.

The profile of anonymous becomes less and less one of sophistication and intelligence and more that of teenage angst and a limited understanding of technology daily.

When you have a large DDoS tool at your beck and call, who has time to bother with accuracy and trifling details like the truth? This is just further evidence that "anonymous" is some unemployed young adult.

The profile of anonymous becomes less and less one of sophistication and intelligence and more that of teenage angst and a limited understanding of technology daily.

From TFA:

The Webalta 92.241.160.0/19 netblock has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) since October 2008. Spamhaus regards the Russian Webalta host (also known as Wahome) as being "blackhat" - a known cybercrime host from whose IP space Spamhaus only sees malware/virus hosting, botnet C&Cs, phishing and other cybercriminal activities.

I sympathize with your impatience with the idiocy that is Anonymous, but what this goes on to show here is that Anonymous, or now better referred to as AnonOps, is NOT unruly teenagers as media have been dutifully reporting, but something else.

The poster above referring to Anonymous as a potential 'false flag' operation has it right. Whether it was started by real teenagers or not is inconsequential: it plays in the interests of those wanting to swerve public opinion in the direction of repressive legislation and it is all too easy to attribute any kind of stunt on "Anonymous", whomever is really behind it.

On Monday Spamhaus became aware that the main Wikileaks website, wikileaks.org, was redirecting web traffic to a 3rd party mirror site, mirror.wikileaks.info. This new web site is hosted in a very dangerous "neighborhood", Webalta's 92.241.160.0/19 IP address space, a "blackhat" network which Spamhaus believes caters primarily to, or is under the control of, Russian cybercriminals.

Important: this warning is issued only for wikileaks.INFO, NOT Wikileaks itself or any other Wikileaks site. Wikileaks.info is NOT connected with Julian Assange or the Wikileaks organization. For a list of real Wikileaks mirror sites please go to wikileaks.ch

The Webalta 92.241.160.0/19 netblock has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) since October 2008. Spamhaus regards the Russian Webalta host (also known as Wahome) as being "blackhat" - a known cybercrime host from whose IP space Spamhaus only sees malware/virus hosting, botnet C&Cs, phishing and other cybercriminal activities. These include routing traffic for Russian cybercriminals who use malware to infect the computers of thousands of Russian citizens.

The fact that recently some unknown person or persons decided to put a Wikileaks mirror on Webalta IP address 92.241.190.202 should raise an alarm; how was it placed there and by whom. Our concern is that any Wikileaks archive posted on a site that is hosted in Webalta space might be infected with malware. Since the main wikileaks.org website now transparently redirects visitors to mirror.wikileaks.info and thus directly into Webalta's controlled IP address space, there is substantial risk that any malware infection would spread widely.

Spamhaus also notes that the DNS for wikileaks.info is controlled by Webalta's even more blackhat webhosting reseller "heihachi.net", as evidenced by the DNS records for the domain:

wikileaks.info. 14400 IN A 92.241.190.202wikileaks.info. 14400 IN NS ns2.heihachi.net.wikileaks.info. 14400 IN NS ns1.heihachi.net.

Spamhaus has for over a year regarded Heihachi as an outfit run 'by criminals for criminals' in the same mould as the criminal Estdomains. The Panama-registered but Russian/German-run heihachi.net is highly involved in botnet command and control and the hosting of Russian cybercrime.

We also note that the content at mirror.wikileaks.info is rather unlike what's at the real Wikileaks mirrors which suggests that the wikileaks.info site may not be under the control of Wikileaks itself, but rather some other group. You can find the real site at wikileaks.ch, wikileaks.is, wikileaks.nl, and many other mirror sites around the world.

Spamhaus takes no political stand on the Wikileaks affair. We do have an interest in preventing spam and related types of internet abuse however and hope that the Wikileaks staff will quickly address the hosting issue to remove the possibility of cybercriminals using Wikileaks traffic for illicit purposes.

Spamhaus is not alone in issuing this Wikileaks mirror malware caution. On Sunday researcher Feike Hacquebord at fellow anti-spam system Trend Micro issued a similar warning in the Trend Micro Malware Blog. (http://blog.trendmicro.com/wikileaks-in-a-dangerous-internet-neighborhood/)

Ah. I was wondering why Spamhaus would bother having an opinion. Answer: if you get your Wikileaks download from the dot-info site, it might be malware infested, because everything else from that domain is. Go download it from somewhere else.

It would be helpful if Wikileaks were to at least put up hashes of the downloads. That would make it abundantly clear if the dot-info site were including malware. But I suppose they've got other things to worry about.

1) This DDoS attack does not seem to be originating from Anonymous but from AnonOps which is a cybergang-related IRC server and the DDoS seems to be originating from a real botnet of hijacked Windows computers, not LOIC.2) Spamhaus warned about wikileaks.info which seems to be hosted by the same criminals and is posting false Wikileaks statements.3) Wikileaks.org has been taken over by these criminals and is redirecting to http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ [wikileaks.info] which is NOT sourcing from wikileaks.ch (and other mirrors like http://www.wlmirror.com/ [wlmirror.com])

It seems to me the US Gov'mint has 'fixed' their Wikileaks problem by a campaign of misinformation and probably paid these Russian criminals to host the false Wikileaks site. It wouldn't surprise me if the wikileaks.info sites started to have certain damning documents disappear or specific ones infected just to track who's reading what.

Any idea why the Russian criminals waited this long to attack Spamhaus? They've been enemies the whole time. I assume Spamhaus has always had mighty powerful anti-DDoS tools.

Perhaps they're redirecting some of their spam power to the DDoS instead, using the Wikileaks story as some kind of cover for that. (Though I don't really get it; they don't need it.) I wonder if that would show up as a drop in spam traffic, though unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to use Spamhaus to measure that.

It seems to me the US Gov'mint has 'fixed' their Wikileaks problem by a campaign of misinformation and probably paid these Russian criminals to host the false Wikileaks site.

What makes you certain that the US is behind this? There's at least a possibility that the Russian government is doing this on the basis of attempting to prevent the release of documents that are embarrassing to the Russian government. They even get free plausible deniability because everyone's going to point fingers at the US government.

The thing I don't get is how they were able to wrest control of wikileaks.org.

The.org domain was with DynaDot and they had (and still have) CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED set.

So why would a US-based domain firm which suspended Wikileaks in fear of the US government then control back over to either1) a group purporting to be WikiLeaks, or2) a group they knew was Russian criminals

Anonymous is very weird to understand. It functions similar to a terrorist bloc (note I am not calling anyone a terrorist).

If I toss a bomb in the middle of a street and kill 50 people - and I write "Terrorist Group X was here" - who's to say it wasn't them? Or if say a terrorist group decides to take credit for the BP spill - who's to say its not?

Its impossible to work out whether it was anon or not. Its impossible to actually call 'anon' a group. Its just a bunch of people who - at will - decide to partake in DDOS attacks. Its not a collective body, its a number of individuals - and its stupid to think otherwise. If I'm in a group with 100 people, and someone says "Lets DDOS Bank of America", if I agree with it, I'll take part. If someone says "Lets DDOS Spamhaus", and I disagree, I won't take part. There's no real leader. Its all chaotic.

So enough with blaming anonymous for this ddos. For a start you have no proof. To continue, anon isn't a group - its a bunch of people following 'random' leaders, and the ranks change frequently depending on who feels like 'some lulz' that day, and who agrees or not.

In fact how do you determine an action as being done by Anon? Done by the 'leader' ? No real leader. Done by a large amount of the group? Not a very good measure.

If I succeed in telling (say) 50% of anonymous that attacking this site is for their better - then will 'anonymous' be attacking the site? Does it matter?

Summary: Anonymous isn't a rigid structure with leaders, anonymous is an amount of individuals who individually follow a leader at that point in time because they agree with that leader at that point.

"Traditionally," there are a number of ways that terrorist groups would identify themselves as being responsible for a given act. The most well-known is the IRA (or the Real IRA (yes, that was their name)) having arranged certain code phraseology and signs to the Royal Ulster Constabulary that would be sent following an action to confirm that it was the RIRA that committed the act.

Obviously the action isn't available to Anonymous, but Anonymous -- specifically, the kids over at 4chan who call themselves 'A

Spamhaus seems to be pretty quick in assuming that wikileaks.info is malicious.

Apparently the site is hosted by a Russian company known to host malware and phishing sites. But how does this prove anything? They might as well be ordinary customers of a webhoster who doesn't take sites down easily.

Somebody who won't take malware sites down probably won't bow to political pressure to take down a Wikileaks mirror - or so they hope. "Outlaws" of whatever kind have a very reasonable interest in common: to evade prosecution and punishment. Whether you're stealing credit card numbers or publishing government/corporate secrets doesn't matter in this context.

It's the same sort of assumption that would be made if Charles Manson opened a childcare centre and dingo petting zoo. Once trust is lost it is very hard to get it back. If they have been using similar sounding URLs to popular sites in the past to spread malware how do we know they are not doing it again?

Screw all this talk, lets look at the page source code and go from there. I booted Knoppix, and pulled up Iceweasel and copy and pasted the page source from wikileaks.info. My html and Javascript skills are not the sharpest. My skills are best in other areas. However, I noticed there is too much talk and not enough transparency here so I posted the page source so hopefully someone would analyze it and talk about the contents rather than jumping on sides of the arguments like some deranged trolls.
Lets have a discussion that not owned by a bunch of drama queens, True geeks work with logic, not Drama.
End of anti-troll rant..
Heres the pastebin link.
http://pastebin.com/dyMkdZEG [pastebin.com]

mirror.wikileaks.info actually seems to be more useful than wikileaks.ch at the moment. It contains all the old leaks in the old (better imho) wikileaks format, together with the wikileaks analysis articles. It also contains links to the new leaks found on wikileaks.ch. I've checked a few of the articles there, and they all look just like I remembered. I couldn't see anything wrong.

I agree that it is strange that the site still uses the old format. It is also strange that the old leaks (from before the Afghanistan, Irak and Cable stuff) aren't available at wikileaks.ch. I'm not sure what to think, but I am far from convinced that there is anything wrong with the.info mirror.

Yeah, their press release also contains a link to Google Safe Browsing [google.com] info that clears them of any wrongdoing. If I were them, I'd also wait some time for peoples defenses to come down, for them to add a NoScript exception for this page, before inserting anything malicious into the code.
It might be they're simply rooting for WikiLeaks, but I wouldn't bet on it. This press release in which they come very close to impersonating the WikiLeaks team is rather damning.

It seems much more plausible that either this wikileaks.info related cybergang is performing the DDoS themselves, stirring up other communities to perform DDoS, or both. I have no experience with this AnonOps group, but I have spent a lot of time looking at *chan culture. As haphazard as a collection of 'anonymous' users generally is, they do not actually get to the point of performing an attack against something without hearing many sides to the story. That is one of the benefits of having so many individuals actively involved rather than an army unthinking zombie computers.

For example, given enough.jpg's, between their collective experience they can collate enough data to link seemingly completely unrelated photos to the same household or person. I have seen this happen over the course of a few threads and the experience was like watching a higher consciousness at work. It totally blew me away.

They will have people who actually do look at what is specifically being blocked by Spamhaus, why, and verify the authenticity of said claims. When you have threads of people calling for destruction it may be hard to turn away the mod mentality, but when people start posting clear facts it can and will do so, leading to the impending attack falling apart before it reaches critical mass.

I don't know much about this AnonOps group as of now, but if they are made up of enough individuals even this article will definitely reach them. As to if they will care, depends what their real goal is I suppose.

In addition to the LOIC and *OIC tools issued to dimwitted script kiddies to DDOS "enemies of Anon" with, AnonOps is now escalating its DDOS attacks using dedicated criminal botnets (botnets of illegally hijacked PCs), and now appears to be directing DDOS attacks not at "enemies of Wikileaks" but at "enemies of our criminal bosses".

There is palpable irony in a DDOS being used to prevent exposure of a probably-false Wikileaks mirror that could potentially harm Wikileaks and Wikileaks readers. We hope that AnonOps supporters appreciate the irony as much as we do.

In a statement released today on wikileaks.info entitled "Spamhaus' False Allegations Against wikileaks.info", the person running the wikileaks.info site (which is not connected with Julian Assange or the real Wikileaks organization) called Spamhaus's information on his infamous cybercrime host "false" and "none of {your} business" and called on people to contact Spamhaus and "voice your opinion". Consequently Spamhaus has now received a number